John Adams's Republic

The One, the Few, and the Many

Richard Alan Ryerson

Publication Year: 2016

Scholars have examined John Adams’s writings and beliefs for generations, but no one has brought such impressive credentials to the task as Richard Alan Ryerson in John Adams’s Republic. The editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers project for nearly two decades, Ryerson offers readers of this magisterial book a fresh, firmly grounded account of Adams’s political thought and its development.

Of all the founding fathers, Ryerson argues, John Adams may have worried the most about the problem of social jealousy and political conflict in the new republic. Ryerson explains how these concerns, coupled with Adams’s concept of executive authority and his fear of aristocracy, deeply influenced his political mindset. He weaves together a close analysis of Adams’s public writings, a comprehensive chronological narrative beginning in the 1760s, and an exploration of the second president’s private diary, manuscript autobiography, and personal and family letters, revealing Adams’s most intimate political thoughts across six decades.

How, Adams asked, could a self-governing country counter the natural power and influence of wealthy elites and their friends in government? Ryerson argues that he came to believe a strong executive could hold at bay the aristocratic forces that posed the most serious dangers to a republican society. The first study ever published to closely examine all of Adams’s political writings, from his youth to his long retirement, John Adams’s Republic should appeal to everyone who seeks to know more about America’s first major political theorist.

Cover

Contents

Preface

Some twenty years ago, while editing the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts
Historical Society, I became increasingly aware that, in both his political
beliefs
and his way of reasoning about government, John Adams stood apart from virtually
all his prominent colleagues in the Revolutionary movement and the
founding of the American republic that followed. ...

Acknowledgments

I wish first to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the
Humanities
for its support of my research at an early stage of this project,
through fellowship FB-39549-03, taken in 2004. To three of my colleagues from
Jack P. Greene’s Early American History seminar at Johns Hopkins University,
Jack Crowley, Peter Onus, ...

Introduction: The Evolution of a Distinctive Republican Vision

Some four decades
ago Gordon Wood, in The Creation of the American
Republic, his classic exploration of the development of America’s
distinctive
constitutional tradition during the American Revolution, memorably
appraised “The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams.” ...

Part One. Adams Moves to the Center

I. A Provincial Reverence for the British Constitution, 1735–1767

Nearly every
prominent leader of the American Revolution
began life as a provincial. These
subjects of Britain’s rapidly expanding
empire were
native sons of the several provinces of British North America,
and
each felt the strongest ties of family
and community, and often of ethnicity and
religion, to his province. ...

II. The Discovery of the Republic, 1768–1772

In the half-dozen
years before American Independence,
John
Adams and thousands of his countrymen in British North America
first encountered
Europe’s
venerable republican tradition as a body of political
knowledge
of compelling relevance for their own day. Technically, this was more of a
rediscovery than a discovery; ...

III. Realm versus Dominion, 1773–1774

The five years from 1772 through 1776 were
among the most
productive of John Adams’s long career
and among the most important
for
his contribution to the freedom and happiness of his new nation, the United
States of America.
Early in this period he finally
resolved the doubts about resisting
British authority that had vexed him since the late 1760s. ...

IV. From Imperial Dominion to Autonomous Republic, 1774–1775

In the winter of 1775, John Adams returned to the theme that
he had begun so tentatively to explore in 1772, the nature of republican government.
His renewed attention to republicanism, however, was no more a deliberate,
self-conscious
decision than his putting it aside had been nearly three
years earlier. ...

V. Building a Republican Orthodoxy, 1775–1776

In May 1775, John Adams shifted virtually all his energies to
the national stage, where he quickly became a leading member of the Second
Continental Congress. For most of that year, the pressing need for Congress to
direct the colonies’ armed defense demanded Adams’s full attention, ...

Part Two. Adams on His Own

VI. Defending Executive Authority, 1775–1780

When John Adams took the floor of Congress in the fall
of 1775 to speak on New Hampshire’s petition for guidance from Congress
in reforming its government, he confronted, for the first time, the issue of
executive authority in the now suddenly autonomous American colonies. ...

VII. An Education in American Aristocracy, 1775–1783

In Thoughts on Government, as in the congressional debates that
preceded it, John Adams argued for a bicameral legislature because
he feared
that Americans, disgusted with royal governors, would ensure that any new executives
they created would be too weak to exercise real authority. ...

VIII. Redefining the Republican Tradition, 1784–1787

As he moved into his handsome residence in the Paris suburb
of Auteuil in August 1784, John Adams could well have believed that his
career
as a writer had come to an end. Over the past two decades
he had used his
pen to navigate a grueling series of intellectual and political
trials:
conceptualizing
and defending colonial autonomy, discovering and explaining the essence
of republican government, securing independence, ...

IX. John Adams’s Republic in Republican America, 1787–1800

When John Adams disembarked with Abigail from the
Lucretia
to a hero’s welcome in Boston on 17 June 1788, after
a decade
of
diplomatic service
in France, Holland, and Britain, his most recent pronouncements
on republican government had preceded him. All three volumes of the
A Defence of the Constitutions had reached America; ...

X. A Retrospective Retirement, 1801–1826

On 4 March 1801, at 4 a.m., eight hours before the inauguration
of his successor, President John Adams boarded a stage bound for
Baltimore, on his way home to Quincy and the longest retirement of any American
president before the twentieth century.
His mood on that day, following his
defeat in the fall of 1800, may be readily surmised. ...

Conclusion: Memory and Desire in America’s Republican Revolution

April was never the cruelest month for John Adams, but
April 1776, which saw the appearance of his Thoughts on Government, was
a month of singular regeneration in the republican tradition. What Adams and
his countrymen accomplished that spring in Congress, in their provincial legislatures,
and in hundreds of county seats, cities, and towns was a remarkable revival
of a political
tradition ...

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